Barely ten days have passed since the election results were declared. The new government has hardly settled into office. Yet within this brief span, Bengal has already begun hearing a familiar sound — not the rhetoric of welfare or democratic renewal, but the grinding noise of bulldozers.
The first targets were the railway stations. In Pandua, Bardhaman, Bally, Bidhannagar, and several other towns, small vendors and kiosk owners suddenly found themselves served with eviction notices. Shops that had existed for decades — often tolerated, taxed, and woven into the everyday life of commuters — were abruptly declared “illegal.” Soon afterward came demolition drives. Tin roofs were ripped apart, wooden counters smashed, and livelihoods erased in a matter of hours. Rehabilitation, where mentioned at all, remained abstract and invisible.
The same pattern soon appeared elsewhere. Footpath vendors and informal traders in Kolkata began facing renewed crackdowns. The scenes around Hogg Market were not merely administrative exercises in “clearing encroachments.” They were spectacles of power. In the language of contemporary governance, the poor increasingly appear not as citizens surviving within a fragile economy, but as obstructions to an imagined orderliness.
The most dangerous word in this political moment may well be “illegal.” Once attached to a person or a settlement, it transforms human beings into administrative excess — something to be removed rather than heard. Legality ceases to function as a matter of due process and becomes instead a moral category. Entire communities are rendered suspect before any hearing takes place.
The recent events in Tiljala exposed this logic with chilling clarity. Videos circulated online showed a Muslim woman pleading with officials, insisting that her family possessed all the required documents and were willing to produce them. But bulldozer justice has little patience for procedure. It is not designed to listen; it is designed to perform power. Its legitimacy emerges not from courts or constitutionalism, but from spectacle.
From “Illegal” to Disposable: The Politics of Demolition
Over the last decade, India has witnessed the rise of a new political aesthetic in which demolition itself becomes governance. What began in states like Uttar Pradesh as a highly publicized campaign targeting largely Muslim neighborhoods has gradually normalized a broader authoritarian impulse: punishment first, legality later. The bulldozer has become both administrative instrument and political symbol.
What is perhaps most disturbing is the social approval such actions increasingly receive. Across television studios and social media comment sections, demolitions are celebrated as instant justice. A dangerous popular morality has taken root — one shaped by decades of cinematic vigilantism and televised nationalism — where the destruction of property is mistaken for the restoration of order. Due process appears slow and inconvenient; spectacle feels emotionally satisfying.
History, however, offers a warning. States that normalize exceptional violence against one section of society rarely stop there. Once the machinery of punitive governance is established, its scope inevitably expands. The same apparatus first used against minorities eventually turns toward workers, protesters, informal economies, and the urban poor more broadly.
There is also an unmistakable economic logic beneath these drives. Railway stalls, footpath markets, and informal shops are not merely “encroachments”; they are among the last surviving economic spaces available to Bengal’s lower-middle classes and working poor. Their removal raises a deeper question: who is the city ultimately being reorganized for? Beneath the language of legality and beautification lies the steady consolidation of urban space in favor of organized capital and corporate expansion.
Bulldozer Governance and the Silence of Democratic Society
And yet large sections of society continue to view these developments from a distance, as though they concern someone else. Much of the middle class remains trapped within narrow anxieties over salaries, dearness allowance revisions, or private security. But democratic erosion rarely announces itself dramatically at first. It advances through normalization — through the gradual acceptance of fear, exclusion, and administrative cruelty as ordinary facts of life.
The great Bengali poet, Jibanananda Das once wrote, “Everyone looks at everyone else from the corner of their eye.” In today’s Bengal, that line acquires a darker resonance. Citizens increasingly look at one another with suspicion; the state looks at citizens through documents and surveillance; and society slowly learns the habit of silence.
That may be the most profound transformation underway. Bulldozers do not merely demolish homes or shops. Over time, they erode the social imagination necessary for democracy itself — the fragile belief that other people’s rights, dignity, and survival are inseparable from our own.
